When first designed, the digital video format was truly revolutionary, not only in its treatment of the storage of video/audio media, but also in the transport used to move media between devices. With a digital tape format, timecode was no longer relegated to special purpose control tracks, but carried along with the relevant video and audio data in a cohesive frame based unit. A pure digital connection (e.g., a connection over SDI or FireWire) allows for data to be transferred between devices with no information loss. Beyond simple timecode, extra space is set aside in each frame to carry other types of useful embedded “metadata”, including such information as camera configuration/exposure settings, time of day, scene breaks, etc.
In many modern non-linear editors (NLE's), most of this auxiliary information is ignored. Moreover, there does not exist a coherent approach for propagating metadata across different stages of the editing pipeline. Therefore, there is a need in the art for an innovative method for propagating metadata across different stages of a video processing system. Ideally, this method should allow an editor to provide different rules for propagating different types of metadata.